[SatvikBeri]

This is a good question. I've tried both approaches, and currently favor going after the rare multi-skilled hire. In general, I have seen many cases where one person who has a small-medium amount of experience/ability in both is a lot more productive than two specialists.

> There are so many more statisticians who can at least communicate and work effectively with developers and vice versa.

Not in my experience. You need to design your data infrastructure to promote easy analysis, and you need to design your models to scale well according to the amount of data you're working with. There are also many cases where a project will require mostly engineering work for a while, and then mostly analysis/statistics work–there are ways to handle this with specialists of course, but there's generally a significant switching cost.

Also people with a combination of statistics & programming aren't that rare–IMO it's more that employers tend to search for both degrees, when instead you should be trying to evaluate the skills directly.